Detecting Corporate Social Media Crises on Facebook Using Social Set Analysis

Social media crises pose significant challenges for organizations in terms of their rapid rate of spread and potential persistent negative associations in terms of brand parameters and sustained negative advocacy by internet users and/or consumers. This paper reports on a technique for detecting social media crises using social set analysis-an approach to computational social based on associational sociology and set theory. Based on a conceptual and formal model of social data, we conduct social set analysis of the facebook wall data of four diferent Danish companies. Findings show the voluminous but also transient nature of social media crises and aggregate user behavioural patterns. We discuss the implications of our findings and the application of the crisis detetction technique for analyzing other epiosodic activities such as product promotions, election campaigns.